Neither side would ever admit it, but MAGA’s ongoing authoritarian takeover is the heir of one man: Dick Cheney, the former Vice President who died this week.
Trump and his movement tried to distinguish themselves by loudly abandoning the Iraq War as a legacy of the Bush administration. During one debate in 2016, Trump pointed out to Jeb Bush that 9/11 wasn’t exactly an example of his brother having kept the country safe. Before the 2024 election, Cheney called Trump the biggest individual “threat to our republic” that the country has ever seen.
Now, now. It’s a shame they couldn’t get along, after all, they had so much in common.
Starting in the late 1980s, Cheney developed and implemented the dictator-like theory of executive power in which we all now live. The roots here lie in the long-held bitterness among many on the right over President Nixon’s resignation in the aftermath of Watergate, but, as NYT reporter Charlie Savage noted, Cheney expressed the idea fully as the Iran-Contra scandal wound to a close. That was a critique of what Cheney described as a “more assertive Congress that no longer honors the traditions” of executive power, but really a vision of a president who, when invoking national security concerns, could do whatever he or she wanted with backing by the full federal government.
At one point, in 2002, Cheney told Cokie Roberts that there had been an “erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job,” citing both the War Powers Act and the Anti-Impoundment Act…..
The U.S. president’s family raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone, a Reuters examination found, on top of potentially billions more in unrealized “on paper” gains. Much of that cash has come from foreign sources as Donald Trump’s sons have touted their business on an international investor roadshow.
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, November 02, 2025]
Binance facilitated $2 billion purchase of World Liberty’s stablecoin and built its technology; clemency for Changpeng Zhao surprised some in administration.
[TW: A trained historian selects the most important excerpts of Sohan Mandami’s victory speech.]
Mamdani began by lifting up New York City’s working people, noting that “[f]or as long as we can remember,” they “have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands….
But in New York City last night, he said, “we have answered those fears…. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy.”
“And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.” ….
“In this new age we make for ourselves,” Mamdani said, “we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another….
Mamdani took on the problem of disinformation in modern politics, noting that “many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them.” He laid that disinformation at the feet of the very wealthy in their quest to divide working Americans to make sure they retain power. “[A]s so often occurred,” he said, “the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system.”
Mamdani urged New Yorkers to embrace a “brave new course, rather than fleeing from it.” If they do, he said, “we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”
[TW: I think it is crucial that Mandami is singling out the rich and oligarchy as the ultimate source of our economic and political dysfunction.]
For the first time in the Citizens United era of billionaires and corporate money buying U.S. elections, change may be afoot. This week, Democrats campaigning on a populist message won resounding victories in the face of big-money opposition….
An aging party establishment is still calling for Democrats to be more moderate and centrist, but what if the center has moved? What if populism is the new centrism?
On this new episode of Lever Time’sMONEYBOMB series, David Sirota sits down with Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, author of the newsletter On Data and Democracy, to discover how the labels that we use in our political system are changing — and how this week’s election results could shift the Democratic Party’s battle against corporate power and the oligarchy.
…Although I’m much closer to Mamdani than Cuomo on Palestine, I remain a little nervous about the introduction of a foreign ethnic conflict into our city. To be clear, that was not Mamdani’s fault. He wanted to focus on affordability, and he “stayed on message,” as they say. He was not the person to introduce the specter of ethnic strife into our city politics. At the very end, his opponents played to hate and bigotry in a shameful way. Humanity has achieved something truly incredible and almost utopian in New York: millions of very different types of people living peaceably—and sometimes even amicably—side by side. That’s every bit as real as the death and destruction halfway around the world. For me, New York is the living counterpoint to all that suffering and hate. It’s worth protecting and building upon. In fact, it’s the most important thing: New York City is, in my humble opinion, the greatest accomplishment in the history of human civilization. We’ve long set the standard for art, culture, industry, literature—you name it. Every good and great thing is available here. As Pericles said of Athens in the funeral oration, “Because of the greatness of our city, the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own.” But in politics, we resigned ourselves, with a weary smile, to a certain cynicism. Now we are attempting a politics that lives up to our humane and cosmopolitan aspirations. Wedded to some hard-nosed pragmatism, it just might work.
I think Mamdani agrees with all this, or I wouldn’t have voted for him. The only thing that prevents this city from being a true utopia is that it’s just way too expensive. It’s hard to build a decent life here. I know some people think that gives rise to a competitive spirit that leads to excellence, but the golden age of New York was when the city was accessible to the middle and working classes, and, in fact, the city was a kind of island of social democracy. For it to be great, New York has to attract the world’s most talented and brilliant, and its most industrious and hardworking, not just its richest, and they are not the same thing. Think of it: All of our fond stereotypes of New York are of working-class people: the accents, the slang, the traditions, the food, etc. They made and still make the city vibrant. I’m not sure Mamdani will be able to narrow the gap between the haves and the have-nots successfully, but I do know he’s right that it’s the problem….
…Mamdani long ago cast his campaign as something more than a race to run one city. He told The Leverthat “this is the heart of the battle for the future of the Democratic Party.” ….
On one side are the party’s long-standing luminaries, politicians, media elites, and operatives still clinging to the dream of a return to pre-MAGA normalcy. Many in this faction spent electiondayvalorizingCheney. Others were insisting that to win elections and face down Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, Democrats should construct a big tent that avoids any unifying national agenda at all, periodically try to out-Republican the Republicans on some social issues, and then label that incoherence “centrism.”
On the other side of the divide are Democratic voters, who, according to polls, are more enraged at their party’s leaders than they ever have been, and for good reason. After years of being told that Democratic politicians simply cannot do anything, even when those politicians have power, Democratic voters watched Republicans use that same power to do whatever MAGA wants….
All of the discontent culminated in a perfect storm in New York City — the capital of global finance, where one in four residents lives in poverty and one in 24 residents is a millionaire. An anti-oligarch message targeting the affordability crisis was bound to resonate in such Dickensian conditions, but it could only reach enough voters because of the city’s clean-election system, which provides grassroots candidates with enough public money to run competitive campaigns….
So, where does this all go from here? I’m not quite sure, but it seems like the first day of the rest of our political lives, which is probably why I’m experiencing a bit of deja vu. To me, this era seems vaguely similar to a moment in 2007 — a time when the crimes and corruption of a second-term Republican presidency were demoralizing and enraging the country every day, and Democratic leaders looked similarly dazed, confused, and complicit.
Back then, I published a book called The Uprising, which posited that the growing anger at the status quo would not dissipate. I argued that it would instead be channeled into either a center-left New Deal-esque movement or a far-right reaction — and my youthful optimism prompted my high hopes that it would be the former, not the latter.
But soon after, the nascent progressive form of populism was funneled by Barack Obama into support for the Democratic Party establishment, and conservative populism was plugged into the tea party movement. When, amid the financial crisis, Democrats turned expectations of hope and change into moreof the same, the tea party was able to foment a backlash birthing MAGA, the Trump presidency, and a societal meltdown that continues to this day….
…For Mamdani, the key to taking down the Democratic machine was creating his own coalition, stitching together a wide cross-section of voters, many of whom had been previously disengaged or ignored in city politics.
Mamdani received an early boost from the Democratic Socialists of America’s most organized and influential chapter; having done work for Sen. Jessica Ramos’s campaign early on, we were always impressed by the volunteer manpower and grassroots fundraising, which provided a long shot candidate an unusually developed campaign infrastructure. With DSA’s help, Mamdani was able to mount an expansive effort to connect with the city’s massive Muslim and Asian communities.
There had never been any concerted campaign to court the former group, leaving swaths of Brooklyn and Queens prime for organizing. Many Asian and South Asian communities had moved to the right in recent years, but a combination of affinity for the candidate and the appeal of his concrete plans, aimed at working class New Yorkers, brought them into the coalition as well. And in the end, he won Black voters by a bigger margin than any other group, unifying communities that for decades were pitted against one another in New York City….
On Friday, Elon Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and falsely claimed that the government shutdown was a dispute over blue states diverting billions of dollars in fraudulent federal payments to undocumented immigrants. Musk claimed that states like California and New York would be bankrupt without federal aid and that they depend on such funding to secure votes from undocumented immigrants.
“The entire basis for the government shutdown is that… the Trump administration correctly does not want to send massive amounts of, like, hundreds of billions of dollars to fund illegal immigrants in the blue states, in all the states really,” Musk said to host Joe Rogan.
What went unmentioned, however, was the actual dispute at the heart of the shutdown: the expiration of subsidies that will dramatically increase health insurance costs for millions of Americans.
Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, and made these false claims on the number one podcast in the United States. Rogan did not push back on Musk’s claims and accepted Musk’s version of reality….
Contrary to Musk’s claims, California and New York would not “be bankrupt” without funding from the federal government. Both states pay significantly more in taxes to the federal government than they receive back in federal funding. The federal government relies on states like California and New York to subsidize states that are less wealthy.
The election wasn’t just a loss—it was a narcissistic injury, and the panic is the tell….
While the result of any of these individual elections would not be surprising, the margins and turnout outperformed expectations in every race. This was a clear reaction—the body politic’s national immune system has been activated by the Trump regime. People don’t like what’s going on in America at all….
The reaction to this moment was not political, it was psychological. It was a mass narcissistic injury sustained by primarily one demographic.
At Speaker Mike Johnson’s daily alternate reality presser, Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) complained about the Democratic victories: “Pro-terrorist Marxist radicals are now the left’s main stream.”
As proof of his claim, Emmer quoted “Commie Mamdani”—the now mayor-elect of New York City:
“‘We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.’
That is a direct quote from commie Mamdani and it should terrify every single freedom loving American.“
Emmer, the third most powerful Republican in the House, transforms the idea of government doing anything, big or small, or caring about people’s concerns, into a radical communist terror plot….
As another example of a very normal reaction to this resounding election loss, the half-trillionaire owner of Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla quote-tweeted Canadian grifter Gad Saad—who is on a mission to end the scourge of empathy. Elon Musk wrote:
“Western Civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard, but necessary for survival.”
Musk’s projected terror about the imminent demise of “Western Civilization” is the core eschatology for incels: If white men are not protected as the elite class—the aristocracy—humanity will degenerate into chaos. It will be a genetic apocalypse….
Evola provided a cheat code for narcissists—and insecure men who aspire to be narcissists—to justify their violence, bigotry, and hate: “ONE FREE TICKET TO VALHALLA! BECAUSE YOU ARE SPECIAL!”
The only small print is that you have to give up your humanity. You have to give up your empathy and humility because it is weak and fails to recognize your superiority.
“The morality of compassion and humility is the morality of decadence; it corresponds to a world in which the inferior prevails over the superior.”
—Revolt Against the Modern World (1934)
“Humanitarianism and compassion are not virtues, but symptoms of a dissolution of the awareness of rank and distance.”
—Men Among the Ruins (1953)
This deliberate rejection of “compassion” is at the heart of every authoritarian regime, big or small. It’s why Hannah Arendt and Gustave Gilbert both saw the absence of empathy as the definition of evil in their observations of the Nazis.
Richard Murphy, November 8 2025 [Funding the Future]
Donald Trump’s Great Gatsby–style party at Mar-a-Lago reveals everything about modern America — excess at the top, hunger at the bottom, and the deliberate cruelty of power without care. As millions faced cuts to essential payments, Trump partied. This is what happens when power forgets compassion.
There’s a theme developing on this channel at the moment, and it’s all about the unaffordability of the wealthy. And if we want an example of that, go and have a look at some of the pictures of Donald Trump partying in Mar-a-Lago last weekend at a supposed Great Gatsby lookalike party that he hosted there.
It’s obscene; wealth was on display, and so was abuse.
Notice how many black people there are in the photographs you can find.
Notice how racially divided that party was as a consequence, in a country where there are a significant number of people who are both black and brown.
Notice how young women were treated as if none of the lessons from Epstein had been learned….
Elizabeth Dwoskin, November 4, 2025 [The Washington Post]
Chris Buskirk put tech elites at the center of power in Trump’s Washington. His efforts are grounded in a controversial theory: An “aristocracy” is needed to move the country forward.
Max from @UNFTR reports on the growing cracks in the financial markets and the unprecedented lengths the Federal Reserve has already gone to in order to stabilize the global financial system. The U.S. is heading toward a full-blown liquidity crisis that threatens to seize up the financial markets. The situation is worsening daily at this point and Trump’s erratic policy decisions are contributing to the destabilization.
Seeking to cut costs, technology companies shed the most jobs, followed by the retail and services sectors, the outplacement firm found. Amazon, UPS, Microsoft and other firms have recently announced layoffs.
Lynn Parramore, Nov 6, 2025 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
…as the government shutdown drags on (and on), the flow of official economic data has slowed to a trickle. The Fed is missing timely labor, inflation, and spending numbers. The Treasury Department is flying blind on cash flows and debt issuance. Even the smaller agencies, like the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), are skipping their usual readouts on spending, income, and investment. This is basic stuff that keeps markets steady and policymakers tethered to reality.
We are becoming untethered, and it’s not just a bureaucratic problem. For everyday people, it can ripple into mortgage rates, retirement accounts, and everything in between.
In the meantime, everyone from Wall Street to Main Street is being nudged toward private-sector data for guidance. And here’s the rub: private players — often with little oversight — have every incentive to spin the numbers in their favor….
Richard Murphy, November 3 2025 [Funding the Future]
Greg Mankiw’s ‘Principles of Economics’ is one of the most widely used textbooks in the world. It has trained millions of students, from first-year undergraduates to policymakers and journalists, in the worldview that defines modern economic orthodoxy.
Its central message is simple: markets work. Prices coordinate behaviour. Incentives shape outcomes. Government should intervene sparingly. Growth, not redistribution, is the path to prosperity.
To generations of students, this has sounded like common sense, and that is precisely the problem. Mankiw’s economics presents itself as neutral, scientific, and apolitical, when in truth it is a moral vision of society disguised as arithmetic. It assumes that market outcomes reflect merit, that inequality reflects productivity, and that the economy can be understood without reference to power.
Hence, the Mankiw Question: if economics teaches that people get what they deserve and markets reward merit, how do we explain the poverty, privilege, and inequality that surround us?
The Democratic Party and its liberal allies refuse to call for mass mobilization and strikes — the only tools that can thwart Trump’s emergent authoritarianism — fearing they too will be swept aside.
Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day.
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